Effect of Buffer or Barrier Layer on Bistability for Nonvolatile Memory Fabricated with Al Nanocrystals Embedded in α-NPD

ABSTRACTRecently, low molecular organic non-volatile memories have been developed as a next generation of non-volatile memory because of nano-meter device-feature size and nano-second access and store-time. We developed a non-volatile memory fabricated with the device structure of Al/ α-NPD/Al nano-crystals surrounded by Al2O3/α-NPD/Al, where α-NPD is N,N'-bis(1-naphthyl)-1,1'biphenyl4-4”diamine. One layer of Al nano-crystals with ∼20 nm-width ∼20 nm length was uniform produced between α-NPD layers, confirmed by 1.2MV high voltage transmission-electron-microscope. This device showed Vth of 3.0 V, Vprogram of 4.3 V, and Verase of 6.3 V. Particularly, this device exhibited an excellent non-volatile memory behavior performing the bi-stability (Iprogrm/Ierase) of >1×102, program/erase cycles of >1×105 and multi-levels. In addition, previous reports about low molecular organic non-volatile memories have showed a bad reproducible memory characteristic. However, this issue was completely solved via isolating Al nano-crystals embedded in α-NPD by O2 plasma oxidation. The uniformity of Vth, Vp, and Ve were 9.91%, 6.94% and 7.92%, respectively. Furthermore, the effect of buffer or barrier layer on non-volatile memory characteristics was investigate to examine the control ability for Vth, Vp, and Ve. The 0.5-nm LiF showed a barrier layer behavior suppressing the bi-stability of non-volatile memory. Otherwise, 15-nm CuPc exhibited a buffer layer behavior enhancing the bi-stability of nonvolatile memory.